Tag: reddit

The New York Times recently ran a piece called “Reddit and the God Emperor of the Internet” about a pro-Trump online community called The_Donald on Reddit. The purpose of the article was to explain to non-Redditors what The_Donald is, who populates this community, and some of the specialized vocabulary used by its 300,000+ members.

It’s a pretty good article, but it’s missing some important things. I’m going to expand their analysis, but first let me give you some quick backstory about how I got involved in this stuff. Back in March, during the presidential primaries, I realized could not name any real live Trump supporters from my various friend circles. I could not think of a single friend in real life or in social media that had mentioned liking Trump or supporting him. And yet he kept winning, so I was really confused. Who is voting for this guy? Am I being pranked? Trump voters must exist, but why haven’t I met any? If they’re not talking to me, who are they talking to?

So, I decided that my social media must be an echo chamber, and decided to find some Trump supporters elsewhere. At this point, I was already a Reddit user, but I had mainly posted in computer science-related subreddits, and occasionally wandered into the SandersForPresident subreddit. But everyone on Reddit seemed to know about The_Donald, the subreddit that was ground zero for mocking Bernie supporters, starting flamewars with the Hillary “shills”, and trying to get their “spicy” Trump meme images promoted to Reddit’s front page. Since I study online software development communities in my academic research, it seemed natural for me to collect data about The_Donald, just like I would do in my normal research.

The first thing I noticed about The_Donald is the highly specialized vocabulary used by the in-group. The learning curve is not terribly steep, but there is definitely a set of jargon that is used to signify belonging. The NYT article touches on some of the terms, but here are my additions:

pol is short for /pol/ which is a board on 4chan devoted to being politically incorrect. Lots of overlap between /pol/ and The_Donald. Please don’t go to /pol/. I warned you.

Cucks. Short for cuckold. Refers to a person who is not a Trump supporter, especially one who “should” be, for example a man who doesn’t support Trump, or a media figure who is giving Trump a hard time. Alternate forms: cuckservative (a conservative who doesn’t follow Trump). Origin: comes from #GamerGate

Spez. /u/spez is the username of the CEO of Reddit. Roundly hated and criticized by The_Donald community. To use this in a sentence, they may claim he is a – vocabulary test incoming – SJW cuck whose company is set up to shill for Hillary using money from CTR. This revulsion and hatred for Spez got turned up to 11 over the Thanksgiving weekend when Spez revealed that he had abused his power as CEO of Reddit to edit the comments of some The_Donald members.

High energy – very high praise. Opposite of “low energy” (as in Low Energy Jeb, Trump’s nickname for Jeb Bush during the primaries).

Red pilled. Happens to people when they find out too much about the lies told to them by “normies” (normal people) and the MSM. Origin: The Matrix – Neo takes the Red Pill and finds out that he has been serving as a human battery.

Aside from initiating new members, The_Donald posters primarily spend their time generating memes, criticizing opponents, and sharing and commenting on links. Near the end of the general election process, some of the more weaponized autists (see #11 above) donated substantial time to working on Wikileaks, specifically in finding anti-Hillary evidence within the leaked Podesta emails. I was also working on the Wikileaks emails, so I noticed them a lot. Their presence on the DNCLeaks and WikiLeaks subreddits was definitely noticed and not always appreciated.

In a prior posting I compared some of the language and beliefs of participants on The_Donald to other online communities, such as free and open source software communities, some white supremacist online communities, and the alt-right media.

The Guardian had a great article today that makes explicit many of the connections between the so-called “alt-right” and other predominantly male online movements/communities such as #Gamergate. I’d extend their analysis by adding two more communities: free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) developers, and pro-Trump communities like the_donald on Reddit. Like Gamergate and alt-right, these are male online communities that have the same predictable speaking style and culture as referenced in the Guardian article:

Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies…. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online.